Metaphor Comprehension Special Issue

Metaphor comprehension in preschool children: Individual differences and metaphor-related factors affecting children’s metaphor comprehension

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Abstract

Metaphor comprehension in children has been a topic of interest for decades. Contrary to the previous belief that metaphor comprehension emerges at the formal operational stage, recent findings suggest that preschool children can also comprehend metaphors when the metalinguistic demands are controlled. However, these studies have primarily focused on children's physical metaphor comprehension, with only a few investigating psychological metaphor comprehension and the factors that influence this process. This study addresses this gap by presenting stories containing psychological metaphors to 62 Turkish-speaking preschool children. Participants were asked to identify the emotion of the character in the story (revealed in the metaphoric phrase only) by selecting the correct picture. Effects of individual differences in cognitive abilities (cognitive flexibility skills, pretend play, and language complexity) and metaphor-related factors (context and familiarity) were also investigated. Overall, children were more likely to choose the picture depicting the correct emotion compared to the distractors and incorrect pictures. A positive relationship was found between cognitive flexibility and metaphor comprehension; however, no correlation was observed between metaphor comprehension and either pretend play or language complexity. Contrary to our expectations, context and familiarity with the metaphors did not significantly affect metaphor comprehension. However, a marginal interaction between cognitive flexibility and metaphor familiarity suggested that cognitive flexibility might be especially important for understanding less familiar metaphors. Generally, the current study replicated and extended the findings, suggesting that preschool children have some understanding of psychological metaphors and emphasized the importance of simultaneously investigating the effects of cognitive and metaphor-related factors.  

Keywords: metaphor comprehension, psychological metaphors, cognitive flexibility, pretend play, language complexity